Create Personalised Props

If you want to easily make professional bespoke props for your photography, personalise goods for your customers, clients or colleagues, create bespoke packaging, sewing projects, products to sell in your online shop, for your wedding, party or just impress your Mum, the Cricut Maker is the way to go.

I use it daily for creating props for my stop motion animation work. Until now I’ve been using the Cricut Explore. A lovely machine that has been a real work horse for years now.

About The Cricut Maker

With 10x more power, the Cricut Maker can cut heavy and light card stock, fabrics, leather, paper and even balsa wood with effortless precision.

What’s really exciting is the introduction of a rotary blade to cut through fabric. (I have some felt projects I’m looking forward to trying). Use it to cut cotton, fleece, denim and more.

Go wireless with Bluetooth® wireless technology. Particularly useful if you’re using a smart device (additional adapter required if you want to use this).

The new addition of the Fast Mode option enables you to cut certain materials 2 times faster.

If you’re new to crafting, the online ‘Cricut Design Space’ is really intuitive and easy to use. There’s also loads of ready made projects to get you started.

For the more advanced uses, you can create your own vector files in Adobe Illustrator (this is what I use) and import them into the design space as SVG files.

You can also print images and the Cricut Maker will cut around them perfectly.

The Cricut Maker can also write! With loads of free fonts available as well as having access to your system fonts, you can write names, messages or line drawings on your projects.

Seriously, the possibilities are endless!

Putting My Eggs In One Basket

To answer my original question, well yes you can put your crafting eggs in pretty much one basket with The Cricut Maker.

Setting Up Your Machine For the First Time

Setting up The Cricut Maker is so easy. All the instructions are provided online. Simply plug in, download the firmware and register. You’re set to go. This step took less than 5 minutes.

When you receive the Cricut Maker, they also include the materials to make the simple card that you see in the GIF image below. You’re walked through every step of this process. Perfect for beginners.

If you’re more experienced and you’re upgrading machine (which I was), the Cricut Design space has all of your previous projects in and you can get crafting straight away.

The Cricut Maker Tools

The Cricut Maker tools are so useful, you’ll be using them for all of your craft projects. Also included in the essential tool set is a useful paper trimmer too.

The essential tools are:

A portable trimmer for quick straight cuts

Trimmer replacement blade

Trimmer scoring blade for scoring lines

Scoring stylus produces neat fold lines

A Weeder to remove tiny pieces and curls

Tweezers with a reverse grip, useful for large projects

A Spatula that lifts images from the cutting mat

(Brilliant!) Scissors with a fine tip and blade cover (I love the Cricut scissors - they are so precise and sharp)

A Scraper which cleans and removes unwanted scrapes from the cutting mat. I also find the scraper excellent for curling paper petals for realistic looking flowers

There are many cutting mats you can use with the Cricut Maker:

Fabric cutting mat (pink)

Light grip mat (blue)

Standard grip mat (green)

Strong grip mat (purple)

My go to mat is the green standard grip for most of my paper crafting projects. They come in handy packs of two. Meaning that whilst cutting shapes on The Cricut Maker, you can weed/remove your cut shapes from the first mat. A nice little time saver.

One of my favourite tools is the Cricut scraper tool

Get Crafting in the Cricut Design Space

Within the Cricut Design Space there are literally hundreds of image files as well as over 50 projects for you to try.

For this review, I decided to start preparing props for my Easter photography and stop motion projects. Using Cricut’s own templates, I set about making an Easter inspired basket, spring flowers and paper eggs.

The image below is just some of the Easter projects available. Some are free and some you can get access to by becoming a Cricut member.

Benefits of a Cricut Membership

As a Cricut member you’ll enjoy 10% off all orders in the Cricut Design Space™ and get unlimited access to over 30,000 images, over 1,000 Make It Now™ projects, and 370+ fonts.

Pay monthly at £7.49 and cancel anytime. Or pay a one-time annual payment of £71.88 (works out at £5.99 per month). That’s the equivalent of a few cups of takeaway coffee for a gazillion images and projects. Pass me the instant coffee, I know what I would rather have!

Cricut Easter eggs in the design space then ready to cut.

Ready Steady Make

Here’s my complete spring flowers and Easter basket project.

Ingredients for the project:

Cardstock in Pool, Grape, Begonia, Tangerine and Sunflower. 216 gsm

Cricut Pearl Paper in Sunshine (for the Daffodils)

I can highly recommend the Cricut Maker. Actually I’m not sure what I would do without mine.

You can purchase the Cricut Maker here. If you have any questions about it, feel free to leave a comment or direct message me on Instagram @georgiestclair. I’d love to see what you’re making for your next project.

Have an inspired day

Georgie x

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Cricut. The opinions and text are all mine.